Decade of inaction: Children still dying because of Idaho’s faith-healing exemption | Opinion

A lot of issues — some important, many not — have been debated this legislative session.

One has scarcely been mentioned.

It has been unresolved for a full decade now: Idaho’s faith-healing exemption, which means that parents who allow their children to die of easily treatable medical conditions — diabetes, a lung infection, an infected cut — as long as they pray over them. Rejection of medical treatment in favor of faith healing is practiced by a number of small sects in Idaho, most notably the Followers of Christ clustered in and around Canyon County.

The first bill to close this loophole was introduced by Rep. John Gannon, D-Boise, in 2014. It was scuttled by House Republican leadership. Gannon has made subsequent attempts, including one last year.

This year, Gannon hasn’t introduced a bill, though he said in an interview that he has raised the issue several times when debating other matters.

“There was no interest in having a bill introduced,” Gannon said.

So we are right where we were in 2014, with one key difference: There’s no longer any realistic hope that the problem will be solved in the near future.

And what has this decade of inaction done?

Kill children.

This summer, the first scientific effort at quantifying the number of children Idaho’s faith healing exemption is killing was published as a study in the Net Journal of Social Sciences.

The paper, “Effects of Religious Exemption Laws on Child Mortality,” was a collaboration between Carissa Wolf, a Boise State University adjunct lecturer in sociology and media, and Guido Giuntini, a BSU adjunct lecturer in economics.

Wolf authored a 2018 Washington Post story on faith healing in Idaho. Wolf said she was continually stymied by a lack of objective data on the question.

“There was a need to have a better understanding of the demographic data,” she said.

The study itself presented a number of challenges, Giuntini explained. Ordinary methods of estimating life expectancy aren’t available. The membership lists of the Followers of Christ aren’t public information, and Idaho makes many basic vital statistics unavailable.

So they turned to a method commonly used in archeology — simply recording the lifespans recorded on gravestones — and they decided to use a nearby cemetery as a basis of comparison. They compared the ages of graves at the Peaceful Valley Cemetery near Marsing, where members of the Followers of Christ are buried, to the Dry Creek Cemetery near Eagle.

The differences are shocking.

The study suggests that the death rate for children in the faith healing sect age 1 year or younger is about 4 times that in the general population. Between 1 and 3, it’s 2.5 times as high. Between 1 and 9, it’s nearly double.

None of this is particularly surprising if you’ve visited Peaceful Valley Cemetery, Guintini said, an experience he likened to visiting the sites of mass killings.

“It’s pretty obvious there’s a lot of children there,” he said. “... It feels really heavy. You see all those children’s graves, and you can’t not think about how much pain there must have been.”

These are deaths of children that the majority in the Idaho Legislature has chosen, eyes wide open, to accept. While they instead debate whether an embryo should be called a “preborn child” in Idaho law. While they instead pursue harebrained conspiracy theories about cannibalism. While they considered jailing librarians for handing out books with gay characters in them.

As Nicole Blanchard reported last year, the children dying are not a mere statistic. At least eight deaths linked to faith healing had been confirmed in the prior three years, including stillbirths. That’s just from the scant public records that are available.

The last bill with some chance of ending this madness came last year, when Gannon introduced House Bill 145. It pointed toward an obvious contradiction: Under Idaho law, there is no faith healing exemption for denying care to your spouse, only to your child. Gannon’s bill would have eliminated that contradiction, allowing for consequences in some cases.

But House Judiciary Chairman Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, never granted the bill a hearing. There was more important work for his committee to do, like making sure it was a felony for doctors to provide treatment to transgender children.

And this year there is no bill at all. Deafening silence.

Has Idaho’s government forgotten about these children? How long they continue to die preventable — and in many cases agonizing — deaths while we whistle past the graveyard?

Forever?

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.